The Long Road Home
Part 1 of 3
"For I do not understand what I am doing, because I do not practice what I want to do, but I do what I hate." — Romans 7:15 (CSB)
I don't remember the day I was saved.
I know the approximate age. I know the place — Roosevelt Missionary Church in Michigan, where my brother James and I rode a church bus every Sunday while our parents stayed home. I remember liking it well enough. I remember resenting being told I had to go.
That resentment probably cost me more than I knew at the time.
I prayed a prayer at Roosevelt. I believed what I was told. And then I did nothing with it. Whether there was follow-up discipleship that I ignored, or whether it simply wasn't offered, I honestly can't say. What I can say is that the responsibility was mine either way. I could have asked questions. I could have sought out more. I didn't.
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When I was a freshman in high school, we moved from Michigan to Knott County, Kentucky — a small town called Littcarr with a population under a hundred people. My mother wanted to get us away from the influences around Detroit. Looking back, she was right. I'm certain our lives would have turned out differently if we'd stayed.
Not long after we arrived, a classmate named Donnie Bailey invited me to Littcarr Bible Church. There was a strong youth presence there — a real community, not just a handful of kids scattered through the pews. I ended up riding shotgun with Dickie Bowers, who drove one of the church vans, helping pick up the other kids on the route. That kind of thing has a way of making you feel like you belong somewhere.
The church had just brought on a new pastor — Jim Carroll, fresh out of Appalachian Bible College. He wasn't much older than we were. And he was the first person I remember who actually taught the Bible. Not just preached around a few verses, but opened the text and explained why things were written the way they were, what the words meant, why it mattered.
That should have been the beginning of something. Instead, I took it in and let it sit.
Music found me there too, through Dickie's family — his parents Richard and Leah Bowers, missionaries to Southeast Kentucky, who served as the church's music leaders, along with his siblings Bonnie, Timo, and Bethany. I went to Camp Nathaniel as often as I could. I attended leadership conferences for older campers. God kept handing me tools.
I kept setting them down.
But something unexpected happened during those years — roughly 1982 to 1986. I was going to Littlecarr Bible Church so regularly that my parents got curious. They started coming too. My mom still goes there today. The kid who resented being told to go to church ended up being the reason his family found one. God has a sense of humor about these things.
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After high school came college, then a career that couldn't seem to find its shape. I studied chemistry. Worked in a cancer research lab. Joined the Navy, became a machinist mate, eventually got certified to work in a nuclear reactor plant. I was good at it. They wanted me to stay and teach. Something still wasn't right.
I got out. Moved back to Kentucky. Ended up being an assistant manager at a Wendy's — which, as it turns out, makes it very hard to get back into chemistry. It was during that season, managing restaurants, that I met Claudia. We got married, moved to Tennessee to be closer to her family, and I have four kids from that marriage: Kieran, Lachlan, Graham, and Hayden. They're all at Virginia Tech now, building their own lives. Claudia is there with them, and they're doing well.
Eventually I found my way into nursing (because of my mother-in-law Peggy) — LPN, then RN, then nurse practitioner, then a DNP. Almost twenty years in now. I like it. I like being able to manage patients rather than just follow someone else's orders.
But through all of it, the spiritual pattern held. I attended church here and there. Nothing regular. Nothing that stuck. I wasn't hostile to faith. I still believed. I just wasn't doing anything with it — the same pattern I'd carried since the day I first got on that church bus in Michigan.
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Then I met Rachel.
She had a faith that was quiet and steady and completely unlike anything I'd managed to build for myself. She went to church. She meant it. And she wanted me to come with her.
That part of the story belongs to Part 2. But I mention her here because she matters — more than I probably knew at the time, and more than I'll ever fully be able to say.
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I'm telling you all of this because I think some of you might recognize it.
Not necessarily the same jobs or the same geography. But the feeling — that low-grade spiritual restlessness, the sense that something isn't quite right even when the surface of your life looks fine. That persistent gap between knowing and doing.
I lived with that gap for decades. I got good at not looking directly at it.
That's where Part 1 ends. Not with a breakthrough. Not yet.
But something was coming.
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*Next week: Part 2 — "Something Broke"*